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Updated: June 29, 2025
All masters, mates, boatswains and carpenters of vessels of fifty tons and upwards were exempted from the impress on condition of their going before a Justice of the Peace and making oath to their several qualifications.
In addition to these Islanders, the vessel had two English sailors, who acted as boatswains over the Islanders, and took care of the rigging. One of them I shall always remember as the best specimen of the thoroughbred English sailor that I ever saw.
She would not speak to me, but, to make use of their expression, `she gave me her eyes, and sometimes a sweet smile. I recollect I was so busy looking at her one day, that I tripped over my sword, and nearly fell on my nose, at which she burst out a-laughing." "Your sword, Mr Chucks? I thought boatswains never wore swords."
Instantly the shrill clamour of boatswains' whistles was heard from each ship, and next followed the measured "clank-clank-clank" of iron cable, as the steam-capstans got to work and began to haul the vessels up to their anchors.
The boatswains on either side in the discharge of their duty and in the heat of the conflict shouted incessantly orders and appeals to their men; the Athenians they urged to force the passage out, and now if ever to show their mettle and lay hold of a safe return to their country; to the Syracusans and their allies they cried that it would be glorious to prevent the escape of the enemy, and, conquering, to exalt the countries that were theirs.
All were stripped to the waist; that was necessary down in the stifling den: moreover the boatswains objected to putting the whip to any back that was covered; they liked to see the effect of the lash, and judge whether the blow was sufficient.
Peering down, in the semi- darkness, George beheld in the senseless one a lean, muscular figure, his naked body brown with long exposure to the sun and weather, covered, as were the rest, with a growth of short hairs and, also as were the rest, with innumerable long cicatrices, some white and evidently the result of wounds inflicted long ago, but most of them of comparatively recent date, showing how mercilessly the boatswains were in the habit of plying their whips.
From this time forward this is to be but a sad history, and the sadness, nay, the cruelty of the story, results largely from the composition of the body of men whom Columbus took with him on this occasion. It is no longer coopers and blacksmiths and boatswains and sailmakers who surround him.
Our officers had their guns on deck, and amused themselves by shooting as many of the birds which came in their way as they could; but my messmates called them by the various names of shearwaters, boatswains, kittiwakes, dovekies, Mollymokes or Mollies, gulls, buntings, and many others, whose names I forget.
One by one the riding-lights of the few store-ships and whalers lying in Sydney Harbour on an evening in January, 1802, were lit, and as the clear notes of a bugle from the barracks pealed over the bay, followed by the hoarse calls and shrill whistles of the boatswains' mates on a frigate that lay in Sydney Cove, the mate of the Policy whaler jumped up from the skylight where he had been lying smoking, and began to pace the deck.
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